Ergonomic design rules provide uniform ergonomic design criteria for manufacturing, assembly, powertrain, and components operations. Such criteria are generally supplied to engineers, designers, builders, vendors, suppliers, contractors etc. to aid them in the proper designing of a manufacturing workstation in order to build a product or component. The ergonomics of the manufacturing workstation must also consider back-up provisions as well as maintenance access and activities.
Generally, however, the ergonomic design rules are implemented too late in the design and manufacturing process after the manufacturing workstation and the product has been built. This late implementation is due to a lack of communication in upstream design process and downstream manufacture process. Due to the lack of communication, ergonomic concerns may not be addressed until the product and design processes are completed. Solving ergonomic problems downstream, however, requires costly changes to the manufacturing workstation. It is also very expensive to build physical prototypes builds for design and process validation.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a computer-implemented ergonomic system to evaluate ergonomic design rules in relation to a manufacturing workstation and a vehicle during the product and process design phase.